Staff Engineer HashiCorp Vault Ecosystem

Introduction

At IBM Software, we transform client challenges into solutions. Building the world's leading AI-powered, cloud-native products that shape the future of business and society. Our legacy of innovation creates endless opportunities for IBMers to learn, grow, and make an impact on a global scale. Working in Software means joining a team fueled by curiosity and collaboration. You'll work with diverse technologies, partners, and industries to design, develop, and deliver solutions that power digital transformation. With a culture that values innovation, growth, and continuous learning, IBM Software places you at the heart of IBM's product and technology landscape. Here, you'l have the tools and opportunities to advance your career while creating software that changes the world.

Your role and responsibilities

We’re looking for Staff Engineers with a deep backend focus to join our team. In this role, you can expect to:

• Share technical leadership of the Vault Secrets team with a peer tech lead, focused on Vault's secrets engines, auth methods and plugin SDK.

• Shape the technical roadmap with product management, and present technical direction and tradeoffs to Vault leadership.

• Work closely with the technical leads of other Vault teams across global time zones, including core, UI and the other plugin teams. Align designs and code ownership on shared plugins and platform features, resolve disagreements, take part in architecture reviews, and avoid teams building duplicate solutions. Break large cross-team projects into phases and weigh the tradeoffs.

• Lead the design, prototyping and implementation of multi-phase, high-impact features. Stay hands-on in code.

• Move plugins onto shared secrets-lifecycle capabilities (rotation, health checks, events, metadata), so features are built once instead of separately in every plugin.

• Own plugin quality end to end: set the test strategy, use defect and escalation trends to decide where to invest, and work with the test automation and support teams to catch problems before customers do.

• Act as a trusted technical advisor to enterprise customers and partners. Take part in escalations, security vulnerability response and production support.

• Mentor engineers at every level through design reviews, code reviews and pairing. Raise engineering standards, and drive AI-assisted development across the organization.

Required technical and professional expertise

• You have 10+ years of software engineering experience and expert-level proficiency in at least one backend language (such as Go, Java or C#).

• You have deep expertise in designing secure, resilient distributed systems, including threat modeling and secure design reviews.

• You have strong Linux skills, including troubleshooting, performance analysis, and scripting in Bash or similar. You also have experience supporting production software, including customer escalations and security vulnerability fixes.

• You have first-hand experience integrating with cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) and other systems that hold credentials, such as LDAP, Active Directory, operating systems, databases and SaaS platforms, with a focus on secrets lifecycle management: credential rotation, short-lived credentials and identity APIs.

• You have led the design and delivery of complex, production-grade software across multiple teams through design documents, mentored engineers at every level, and helped shape product roadmaps. You are still hands-on in design and code, make AI tools a natural part of how you build software, and are known as an expert beyond your own team.

Preferred technical and professional experience

• You have a proven track record of measurably improving software quality and reliability, such as reducing defects, regressions or escalations, through test strategy, test automation and root-cause analysis.

• You have designed SDKs, plugin frameworks or public APIs that other teams and partners build on, and you know what it takes to keep them backward compatible across releases of software that customers run themselves.

• You have experience with HashiCorp Vault, especially plugin development, or with building Terraform providers, ideally in Go.

IBM is committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal-opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, caste, genetics, pregnancy, disability, neurodivergence, age, veteran status, or other characteristics. IBM is also committed to compliance with all fair employment practices regarding citizenship and immigration status.